Changing Azure Recovery Services Vault to LRS Storage

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Back in the classic portal with backup services it was an easy fix. Simply change the settings value of storage replication type. I’ve recently started moving my workloads to recovery serveries vaults in ARM, and noticed something peculiar. By default, the storage replication type of the vault is GRS.

 

If your needs require geographically redundant storage, that that’s perfectly fine. I however don’t have such needs, and trust in Microsoft’s ability to keep data generally available in a LRS replication topology. It should be just like it was in classic, as an option anyways, right? Strangely, the option to change the replication type for the storage configuration on the vault is grayed out.

 

 

Odd, right? I thought so, until I found this.

 

Okay, well it’s not optimal but it looks like I need to remove the backup data from the vault to change the storage replication types right? Well, I gave that a shot and no go. I had the same issue, the option was still grayed out.

I ultimately had to completely delete, and create a new recovery services vault. Once it’s initially created you can change the replication type.

 

 

Ah, finally! Then register the VM(s), run some backup jobs and voila! Confirmation that the vault is using LRS storage.

 

I hope this makes your day at least a little bit easier.

Thanks,

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5 thoughts on “Changing Azure Recovery Services Vault to LRS Storage”

    Michael said:
    November 17, 2017 at 8:06 am

    So the only way to change from GRS to LRS is to delete all your backups. Or start a new service and leave the GRS intact and keep paying for it. Too bad there is no way to move it over. If you got here after 6 months of backups like me then you are out of luck and MS will not help you. (sorry)

    Reply
      mshansen01 responded:
      November 17, 2017 at 9:14 am

      Unfortunately as it stands today – yes. Though you can stop all active backups to the vault, and the restore points with shorter retentions should purge themselves. This way you’d still be paying for GRS, but after so long you’d only be paying for the long-term backups (monthly/yearly) and eventually those will phase out as well allowing you to then pull from the newly created LRS vault.

      I’ve not tested it, but you may also be able to change your policy for a much shorter retention period for the backups you don’t want (daily, weekly) then after a few weeks (in theory) you should only have the monthly/yearly restore points in the vault.

      Reply
      Tony said:
      January 9, 2018 at 6:59 am

      I’ve tried creating a new vault with LRS but unable to select existing server because it’s protected by another vault. Stopped backups, still no good. Only way is to delete all data. Not a big for me because this is a non-prod environment and I’ve only been backing it up for a week but this would be an issue in production. I don’t see why I can’t leave the old data in place and continue paying for it until the retention period expires.

      Reply
        mshansen01 responded:
        January 9, 2018 at 8:36 am

        I agree, unfortunatly that is not a supported configuration by Microsoft at this time.

    Tarvinder Singh said:
    January 17, 2018 at 12:31 am

    Great post. Appreciate you shared this information with some nice testing you did. I was looking for this info only and Azure is full of mysteries.

    Reply

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